Andy Goldsworthy’s “Road Line”: An Interview

By Carl Little | Art New England

In early September 2024, world-renowned artist Andy Goldsworthy returned to College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine, to complete Road Line, the granite curbstone that snakes across the campus from Eden Street to Frenchman Bay. Mostly finished in 2023, the 1,500-foot-long permanent piece lacked an ending where it wound down to the college’s dock.

On a visit to the site, Goldsworthy sat down for an interview in a nearby wooded enclave, the temporary “office” for the artist while on site. The transcript has been lightly edited.

Art New England: In an interview about your College of the Atlantic piece, you said, “I saw there was the road and I saw there was the sea and I saw there was a campus in between.” Is that how the concept for Road Line started?

Andy Goldsworthy: Well, the concept started way before coming to Mount Desert Island. It came from the work I had been engaged with in granite on the east coast of America. I don’t get many opportunities to work with granite where I am in Scotland, even though I have a little bit—well, we do have a lot of granite, but it’s not exactly where I live. It’s nearby. I’ve never really worked with that.

But it’s not just the stone. It’s the granite industry here [in Maine]. There’s a wealth of knowledge and connection to the stone and the buildings and the land that [offers] a particularly interesting context.

So, it was working with the quarries and going into the quarries and, I guess, seeing the curved curb stones. I think, “What are these curves?” and then the realization that you can make those curves with granite. You cannot do it with other stone if it’s too embedded. It’s the ability to chop granite that allows these curves to be made. And then seeing the roads and the extraordinary curves that are in the roads.